


Come on Up

by aderyn



Series: Compounds or Stars [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221b, ASiP, Gen, Post Reichenbach, endings are beginnings, seventeen steps, the address is 221B Baker street
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-19
Updated: 2012-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:27:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There's hell in high places.  At first he could barely climb the stairs, but then he took them, all seventeen, at least two at a time."</p>
<p>Cast off the cane, and thank the Fates for second floors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come on Up

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by Tom Waits' soulful "Come on Up to the House."

 

There's hell in high places.  At first he could barely climb the stairs, but then he took them, all seventeen, at least two at a time. He's never climbed back down, not really: Cast off the cane, and thank the fates for second floors.  
  
He’s tumbled downstairs to tear up the thoroughfares and almost die. It's grace.They owe each other nothing except to climb back up, sit in the kitchen bathed in lactic acid and adrenaline, drink tannic liquids, talk, sleep, mind one another’s gaps.

When they go up, they correspond, natural facts at the top of the stairs.  
  
He’s been so good at looking up: at Sherlock’s chin (oh,he’s not that short), at eight-foot hitmen, at Dartmoor mounds, at all their windows blown to hell, at the open door and the wounded wall.

Now he thinks about walking down while it’s still light, and instead he stays until the moon’s caught in the curtains.

_You were so watchful, my kitchen genius; your gaze might make the bookshelves tip, the tables turn, the world tilt on its insomniac axis. You’d stare out the window until the street inverted: below, above; above, below._

Sometimes, on the steps, a sweet wheel of the imagination will turn a hospital roof into one in Brixton--a cane, a cab, a bullet, a beginning.  

**Author's Note:**

> Also inspired by Phillip Larkin's "Sad Steps":("O wolves of memory! Immensements!/ No...One shivers slightly, looking up there")and Elizabeth Bishop's "Insomnia":  
> "...into that world inverted  
> where left is always right  
> where the shadows are really the body,  
> where we stay awake all night,  
> where the heavens are shallow as the sea  
> is now deep, and you love me."


End file.
